<Begin Segment 6>

AI: So to, to go back a little bit, I think you had told me at another time that it was 1930 that your family actually moved to Sacramento.

EH: Yes, yes.

AI: And that you were just about going to have a birthday.

EH: That's right. They moved on my seventh birthday. And I just, in my eagerness to make friends, and I didn't even think about it. I guess I don't really remember birthday parties, but I guess I must have had them, because when I moved... when we moved finally to this first floor flat, I invited the kids that lived around that house to a birthday party. And never did I think to ask my parents. That never came up. And here my parents were caught suddenly. They must have been bone tired from moving, but here were all of these kids coming, and my father rented the (1st) floor -- well, I don't know whether he rented, but the family that owned the grocery store across the street was living above us at the time. And so he went over and consulted with Mr. Inai, "What, what shall I do?" And so Mr. Inai, running the grocery store, says, "Here, take two melons, watermelons." And that's what they did. They, my father cut these big watermelons on the front porch -- there was a low front porch right off the sidewalk -- and here, that's what we had. Watermelon. And I realized, I was seven and then I realized that oh, I guess I should have asked my parents if I should do this. But it was hot and that was, that was funny.

AI: Well, so that was summer. So that was summertime when you moved to Sacramento.

EH: June 30th. (Yes), so when school started, life took quite a change, because I was basically playing with Catholic kids who all went to parochial schools.

AI: In your, but they were in your neighborhood?

EH: Yes. They were adjacent to... I had Italians on one side. I had black families and Portuguese on, on the west side of us, and those two families went to public schools. But the kids on the south, (yes), south of us were all parochial kids. Went to St. Mary's. And when school started, we almost parted company because we no longer played. I don't know what we did on Saturdays, but I learned a lot about Catholic schools. I used to go to confession with them, when I did that I couldn't go into the confessional, but I would walk around the cathedral and study the, the signs, the something of the cross. Stations of the Cross. And, and they had me trained, like every time I said, "Gee, you guys," they'd make me make the sign of the cross, you know. And I just learned a lot. They had confirmation and they had, I think on Good Fridays or Easter they had a little parade, kind of a worshipful kind of parade. And we had a couple of Mexican families in the area, and every time somebody had confirmation or baptism or something, these Mexican families would be making tamales for days ahead of time and it was such a treat on hot summer, hot Sacramento nights that they had these big long tables out and they would invite everybody in the neighborhood to come and have tamales. And I miss those hot tamales even now. The tamales around here don't taste anything like what I remember in Sacramento. We went to a very cosmopolitan school. There must have been, oh, at least a third Japanese, maybe third Chinese, good portion Mexican, and maybe a quarter was, were Caucasian kids. So we learned all the holidays, and, and it was fun.

AI: It sounds like that was quite different from your earlier years in Chico where it sounds like you mostly were... well, of course, you were very young then.

EH: Uh-huh.

AI: But most of your time was spent with other Japanese American kids.

EH: (Yes), just the half a dozen families that were on our block practically, though, though my parents... we went to First Presbyterian Sunday school, for instance, and these international night pictures, I -- Chinese family that was next door to us were also in a, you know, small cubicle, and they had their Chinese mandarin collared silk dresses and, and sitting. They must have been teenagers, but one of the things that, one of my earliest recollections, memories, was waking up sometime in the evening, must have been fairly early evening, it was hot, nobody was home. I called for my mother and my father. Nobody answered. And I came down some fairly steep stairs, and I had a long nightgown on, and it's a good thing I didn't fall because nobody was around. And I, cryingly, I was able to get outside. They might have, in those days maybe we didn't lock our doors. But I went down the stairs, around the corner to the Chinese family because that's the only place I would know to go. I think there wasn't even a house on the right side of the, of our house. It must have been an empty lot. But anyway, they took me in and then one of the girls came, carried me back, and we sat on the steps until... they knew that my parents eventually were going to come home. So we stayed there and they came home. They had been to a movie. They took my, my (younger), Martha, who was, I don't know, maybe two years old, with them, and she'd fallen asleep. So they came home, put her in bed and then took me back to the movie house. Now, I don't remember anything about the movie or the movie house much, but I certainly remember wailing. I must have, I could have woken up the neighborhood. But they were so -- I remember that's, that was so good of them. The other thing I remember of the Chinese family is they, they would come in and bring me home and play with me some. But one of the things I remember was they gave me my first spoonful of peanut butter, and I thought that was the greatest thing. I finished that and I ran home and said, "How come we don't have peanut butter? How come we can't have peanut butter?" And my mother was always a nutrition freak. I mean, she, she wouldn't let us have sugar, for instance. So it probably didn't take her long to discover peanut butter.

My father must have known about it having... a lot of Issei men, when they first came to this country -- especially if they were students -- they were houseboys, and they learned everything there was in the American life. My father, even from those days, I remember he would bring home cottage cheese and mayonnaise and oysters. Those were his kind of gourmet favorite things. And one of the funny things that ends up is, he used to love mayonnaise, he used to love mayonnaise on his tofu. Every Asian I say that to says, "Ooh, yuck." [Laughs] But I still like it, therefore. But grits was something else. Hominy grits was something he also brought home. But... or cheese. He brought a variety of cheese home. And, and that kind of continued with him.

But he was diabetic. I remember from... some of my earliest recollections was that he was always having to test his urine and he had a Bunsen burner, the test tube, and he would put the urine in there and light the Bunsen burner, and I don't know, he probably watched how long that went on. But then after it turned color, he had a strip and he would match, match the blue, and then he would know whether his glucose was up or down. But my first English words that I had to learn was going to the store and saying, "One hundred percent whole wheat bread, please." And I'd say that all the way to the grocery store, so I, I wouldn't forget. And that's the way -- my father always carried two slices of whole wheat bread wherever he went. And he, and he was always regretful of not being able to eat sushi or whatever, because as salesmen there are always, rural folks always delight in bringing a lot of special foods, and he could never eat... he, even, I don't think he ever ate rice, and one of the things my mother said when I came to Sacramento, I, was that I came down from the Inais, who were upstairs, and, and said in a surprise, "Do you know Mr. Inai is a man, but he eats rice." So my mother said, "This child -- " I think I heard her saying this -- "This child apparently thought that men didn't eat rice, because her father never ate rice."

But after he got into the TB sanitarium and, and there were, you had to, you had time to kill, well, one of the things they learned was nutrition and all about diabetes, and then he found out that all the, all his days he could have been eating... a couple of sushi wouldn't, were not going to hurt him. He could have had his cup of cornflakes, which he loved, that he could never have and, and that kind of thing. It, we've come a, come a long ways. But he, he was, he was a gourmet-ist of limited ability. He was also very fashion-conscious. I mean, he had to have just the right colors. And we had a Graham Paige, which was a great car in the '20s. And that's what he traveled with. But a lot of the -- I remember there was another wealthy Japanese farmer in Gridley who also had, I don't know, a big Buick or something. I remember being impressed.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.